52. Appalachian trail

     “‘The trail,’” dictated Wimsey [to journalist Salcombe Hardy], “‘breaks off at the crucial point. How did the razor get into the hands of Paul Alexis?  If once I could be satisfied of that, the answer might at once set at rest all my doubt.  If Paul Alexis can be proved to have bought the razor, I shall consider the suicide theory to have been proved up to the hilt.  But until that missing link in the chain of evidence is reconstructed, I shall hold that Paul Alexis was foully and brutally murdered, and I shall spare no efforts to bring the murderer to the judgment he has so richly deserved.’  How’s that, Sally?”

     “Not too bad.  I can work that up into something.  I shall add, of course, that you, knowing the enormous circulation of the Morning Star, are relying on the wide publicity it will give to this statement to etcetera, etcetera.  I might even get them to offer a reward.”

     “Why not?  Anyway, pitch it to ’em hot and strong, Sally.”

     “I will—for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.  Between you and me, would you be satisfied it was suicide if the reward was claimed?”

     “I don’t know,” said Wimsey.  “Probably not. In fact, I am never satisfied.”

Dorothy L. Sayers:  Have His Carcase (1932), chap. XI

In about 1908, Mrs. Olive Dame Campbell by chance heard a student at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky sing the old English ballad “Barbara Allen,” and she thereafter began canvassing the Appalachian region for remnants of other folksongs from the British Isles. Upon meeting Campbell and seeing her work, English folklorist Cecil Sharp at once recognized that Campbell had “tapped a mine which if properly and scientifically explored would yield results—musical, historical, literary, etc.—of the first importance.” (I quote this from a very useful 1999 article by Michael Yates, “Cecil Sharp in America: Collecting in the Appalachians.”) In the following years Sharp went on three extensive collecting trips with his amanuensis Maud Karpeles. In their 46 weeks in the field, they collected 1612 specimens, publishing their findings as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), with an expanded second edition in 1932. The map below appeared in that second edition.

SOURCE:  scan of Frontispiece of vol. 1 of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (2nd Ed.), collected by Cecil J. Sharp, “including thirty-nine Tunes contributed by Olive Dame Campbell” (1932)

The “counties in which the songs were collected” (and only these) are shown by their borders; otherwise, only state borders are indicated. The 1000’ contour line is given in much more detail, zig-zagging to reveal several distinct ridges.  The story told by that more detailed contour line surely regards the remoteness of the locations in which Sharp collected his specimens:  a distance that may not appear very far on the map might be separated by a considerable difference in elevation with few passable routes.  Indeed, absent from the maps in both editions is any indication of road access, even between the few cities marked.  In his introduction Sharp emphasizes that his journeys took him into very remote locations; consequently, the texts gathered in those places are relics of a tradition that has persisted and developed apart from the increasingly urbanized world down the hill.

At the same moment that Sharp and Karpeles were finishing their journeys up and down the Appalachian hills, a Kentucky boy who would have been particularly interested in their endeavors was “over there” in France.  Indeed, from his wartime experience John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) eventually published a book of soldier songs which, even with its texts somewhat sanitized, still merits its title, The Songs my Mother Never Taught Me (1928).  Returning after the war, Niles was fascinated by the findings of Sharp, Campbell, and Karpeles—and by the burgeoning interest in folk music generally.  He set about to find some treasures of his own.

     

     “Satisfied?” asked Hardy, as Wimsey returned from the police-station.  He had telephoned his story to Town and was absorbing a little refreshment after his labours.

    “I ought to be,” replied his lordship.  “The only thing that worries me, Sally, is that if I’d wanted to invent a story to fit this case, that is exactly the story I should have invented.”

Have His Carcase, chap. XIV

From the start, this blog has been as much about what’s on the page as about how it got there.  I’m passionately interested in the textual antecedents of whatever is in front of me.  Where did this come from?  Whose hands were on it?  What changes (small or large) were wrought?  What do such changes convey to us about how comfortably this music exists as a notated text at all?  But what about when the textual trail grows prematurely cold?

SOURCE:  scan (p. 49) from a field notebook of John Jacob Niles,
preserved among his papers at the University of Kentucky;
this image is taken from from Ron Pen,
I Wonder as I Wander:  the Life of John Jacob Niles (2010).

Here’s an example of something that clearly is not comfortably finding its way into notation.  (Apologies for the comparatively low-resolution of the scan—but I don’t think that will prevent anyone from following the rest of this post.)  It shows a page of one of Niles’s notebooks, and purports to be his earliest attempts to notate the song “I wonder as I wander,” in Murphy, North Carolina, on July 16, 1933 (starting about one-third of the way down the page).  The two following pages have further attempts.  Ron Pen, who was the Director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, has probably given more sustained attention to these pages than anyone else in the world, and has pieced together a narrative of what these tidbits reveal about Niles’s compositional process.  Yes, I said it:  compositional.  While the inspiration of this song came out of the mouth of another (Niles noted down: “singing of a girl who calls herself Annie Morgan about 16 or maybe younger, very pretty—very unwashed”), whatever he heard Morgan sing was radically transformed before Niles published the song.  As Pen recounts, Niles’s compositional sketches from late September and early October 1933 gradually accumulate two further stanzas, and several different versions of the tune.  Those pages also have notes like “Carl E[ngel] will not take it this way (the ending is wrong).”  Engel was Niles’s publisher at G. Schirmer, and he himself wasn’t above a little textual meddling if it would make a better product in the end.  The textual trail doesn’t just grow cold at July 1933, it is non-existent; a better metaphor would be a spring emerging from the soil, flowing forth with no obvious source.  Yet I have no problem regarding “I wonder as I wander” as an Appalachian folk-song, as it flows out of a(n extrapolated) tradition, even though it is actually the calculated artistic product of John Jacob Niles in dialogue with his publisher.  In the memorable words of Thomas Dunhill, “let us disabuse ourselves of the idea that a folk-song is a song written by nobody and arranged by Cecil Sharp” (p. 246).

There is a pretty good chance you have heard Niles’s song:

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,

How Jesus the savior did come for to die

For poor on’ry sinners like you and like I;

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

It often shows up on Christmas concerts in all sorts of arrangements, particularly for choirs.  And it’s a good tune, often described as “haunting.”  The tune is unusual:  all four phrases begin with the same sequence of notes, but each phrases ends differently; the last phrase has both the highest and lowest pitches of the melody, with what is perhaps an unexpected final note—unresolved, lingering, making the silence which must eventually follow it seem poignant indeed.  About twenty years ago when I heard the new tune by Swiss composer Carl Rütti, I was puzzled:  as far as I’m concerned, the original tune was the best part.  Why throw it out?  

The first three lines of the lyric seem to stem directly from the encounter in Murphy, NC, but possibly not the repeat of the first line as the last line of the stanza came from Annie Morgan.  (Niles failed to continue that pattern in his other stanzas, which I think that is a weakness.)  The subject/object confusion of “like you and like I” at least provides a rhyme, but in my mind’s ear I can still hear my father’s audible wince anytime he heard that sung.  (He always had a red pen in his pocket, and I can remember him adding proofreader’s marks to Christmas letters sent by friends and relations.  You can take the professor out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of some professors.)  The strongest line is the very first:  not just the near rhymes of wonder and wander, but under too.  Nothing else in the lyric rises so high.  And I note that nothing in the first stanza really defines this as a Christmas song; but Niles and Engel surely knew it would be more marketable as such.  And so it was published as an “Appalachian Carol” in Niles’s anthology Songs of the Hill Folk (1934), and then in numerous arrangements thereafter.

Niles eventually realized that his song was a goldmine, but he then had to find ways of claiming authorship of something he had hitherto presented as collected material.  I see that the blurb about this song in The Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook strives for some mystical union of composed and folk, even below the explicit attribution “Words and Music by John Jacob Niles”:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 206 of The Reader's Digest Merry Christmas Songbook (1981).

... whatever that means.  In that Reader’s Digest collection, the song is grouped in a section of “Christmas Folk Songs and Spirituals.”  In The New Oxford Book of Carols—a splendid resource to which I have turned before in these posts—the tune is allocated to the “Traditional Carols” section, not the “Composed Carols.”  Yet I think we could make a pretty good case that some items in the “Composed Carols” are far less composed than this one.  (“In dulci jubilo,” anyone?)  Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said something like All music is folk music.  I never heard no horse sing?  (Probably not.  Whoever it was, we get the point.)

The problem with this question of attribution is that, rather like the boy who cried “wolf,” the deception involved in “I wonder as I wander” makes it hard to trust anything that Niles has claimed anywhere else.  He said that he paid Annie Morgan six quarters to sing the song a few times as he tried to write it down, and Pen believes that one can see those efforts on the pages of the field notebook.  In any case, the $1.50 Morgan received was nothing compared to the profits that Niles brought in by appropriating her unattributed idea.  Pen quotes Ellen Steckert’s perceptive remark:  “to have discovered the natural gem was then far better than to admit to having produced it artificially” (p. 156).

(Eeyore knows all there is to know
about not being satisfied.)
SOURCE: Illustration by E. H. Shepard;
scan taken from The Project Gutenberg
e-book of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Niles produced a string of such discoveries (if that is what they are... which I doubt) and I notice a trend:  not only is he the only person to have notated anything resembling these tunes, but his informants are very often conveniently untraceable.  Annie Morgan was the daughter of an itinerant preacher, and they were headed out of town (with Niles’s quarters paying for the fuel).  Other singers who sang for him are identified with vague phrases like “a very willing old lady known as Granny Holcolm,” “a woman who was cooking for a preacher’s wife in Asheville, N.C.,” “an elderly woman named Mrs. Nuckols, who lived somewhere north of Yorkes, Ky.”and the like.  Niles may have been very much concerned with being compensated for his troubles, but the buck stopped with him:  his untraceable sources were useful as characters in his J. Peterman-like descriptions of how he (allegedly) collected each song, but nothing beyond that.  (Such rambling prose accounts reach their zenith in The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles (1960), the title which seems to give away the game).

SOURCE:  scan of contents page

And is it true? (to channel John Betjeman); for if it is...  then some of Niles’s findings blow one's mind.  The specimens he claimed to find of English carols surviving in the Appalachians are far more startling than anything that Cecil Sharp turned up, precisely because they seem at odds with what we know about religious traditions on the frontier.  Certainly we don't expect the Marian focus of “Sing we the Virgin Mary” (which, as the NOBC observes, “would appear to be a near-miraculous survival of the fifteenth-century English carol text ‘I sing of maiden that is makeless’ (British Library, Sloane MS 2593, where it appears without music)”).  Ah, but Niles didn’t have find Sloane MS 2593 to learn of this text, as he had the [old] Oxford Book of Carols at hand already, which included Martin Shaw’s tune for it.  When Niles published his version (“I took down this song in Mayfield Ky., in 1933, sung by members of the Mathers family, who were said to be tenants on a near-by farm”), he comments that “in comparing the verses below with the original, we observe a similarity that goes beyond mere chance.”  I won’t argue with that:  Niles left nothing to chance.  (I’m reminded of the exchange in the W. C. Fields film My Little Chickadee (1940):  “Is this a game of chance?” / “Not the way I play it.”)  This pamphlet, The Anglo-American Carol Study Book, reads as one-upmanship against the by-then-deceased Cecil Sharp.  Anything you can find I can find a more curious example.

More curious still is the putative survival of the “Corpus Christi carol” (also found in the Oxford Book of Carols and a number of other sources Niles knew), and with a visceral eucharistic text that to my mind is more haunting than anything in “I wonder as I wander”:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 126–27 of The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).

I won’t go into the extremely complicated story about Niles’s “discovery” of this one, as David Reed Parker has already done a masterful job at that.  (See his “John Jacob Niles and Revisionist Folklore:  The Corpus Christi Carol/‘Down in Yon Forest’” in Southern Folklore 49/2 (1992), pp. 147-56.)  It is worth tracking down Parker’s article, even if he is a little more willing to accept Niles’s word than I am.  Ron Pen, too, is generally willing to give Niles’s documentation the benefit of the doubt:  “To conceive of creating such fraudulent sketches [of ‘I wonder as I wander’] would require prodigious foresight and an unbridled imagination for forgery” (p. 152).  Exactly.  As Lord Peter almost said, these are exactly the sketches I should have invented.

But is there some aesthetic legitimacy in such deception?  Don’t we hear it differently if we think it is not just Niles’s creation, but something that has been passed through oral tradition up in the Appalachian hills?  I am reminded of Fargo, the great film by Joel and Ethan Coen (which has spun of a television series exploring the world in which the film takes place).  It opens with this notice:

SOURCE:  screenshot from the film, borrowed here from https://creepycatalog.com/true-story-movie-fargo/

And yet, if you watch the final credits all the way to the end, you get the standard disclaimer:  “No similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.”  The story is entirely made up, but we are instructed to watch it as true—and (I would contend) that makes an important difference in our reception of it.  We are enabled to enjoy it in a different way than if we approach it as fiction.

Maybe there is something similar going on with Niles’s “Appalachian carols.”  But one thing is clear:  John Jacob Niles forged a trail.  In one sense or another.

51. Cutting out the middleman?

 Why should we assume a priori that any score prepared some centuries ago by one musician for another musician to play from cannot be used by a musician today without the intervention of someone (often a non-musician) with a Ph.D. in musicology?  Why does the score first have to be entirely rewritten in some other form and accompanied by a lengthy critical report that can only be understood by someone else with a Ph.D. in musicology?

Alexander Silbiger:  “In Defense of Facsimiles”

Historical Performance 7/2 (Fall 1994), p. 103

SOURCE:  screenshoot of Facebook group post (June 26, 2022); poster name and profile picture redacted 

Today this blog turns six years old.  My original intent was to get to about fifty posts, posting twice a month for two years.  But it has slowed to a trickle.  With a change of jobs and then the more crowded schedule imposed by a global pandemic, it has taken me six years to reach the intended scope, and yet the list of topics that I scrawled in the summer of 2016 is not yet exhausted.  Today’s topic is from that list; it came to mind again this past February with the death of composer George Crumb (1929-2022).

There’s nothing quite like examining one of Crumb’s scores—especially those which require an oversize format to be legible at all.  His published scores very often bear this notice:

SOURCE:  found in a considerable number of Crumb scores; this is scanned from the title page of Mundis Canis (Edition Peters, 2000).

With good reason:  his notation is meticulously clean, and his innovative and idiosyncratic graphic notation would be challenging for a professional copyist/engraver to reproduce (which would add substantially to the cost of publishing the music).  If you haven’t seen any of it, just google george crumb graphic notation; sure, you’ll also get some non-Crumb images, but you will quickly get a sense of what he accomplished.  (Here’s a tribute that appeared in the Washington Post and has remained on my desk for several months to remind me to write this post.)  Crumb reminded me of this long-delayed post because he effectively bypassed an editor:  he cut out the middleman, with his carefully prepared fair-copy scores becoming the unmediated text for the performers’ eyes.

That sounds like a good idea:  no interfering editor meddling with the text.  And I have sometimes taken editors to task for overreach; even for making things too easy (in a way, like subverting the teaching of cursive by putting everything in print).   But I’m not in the least ready to dispense with the what a good editor offers us.

I remember very clearly a particular moment on an afternoon in the autumn of 1997.  It was in my first semester in graduate school, and my classmates and I were in a seminar about Haydn’s string quartets.  The professor was at the time finishing up a volume of some of the quartets for JHW—Joseph Haydn Werke, the (still ongoing) complete critical edition of Haydn's works.  One very important thing I learned from that seminar was to never assume I knew “what the composer wrote,” based on whatever edition I was using.  The JHW is actually among the most scrupulous of the 20th-century critical edition projects to give a pretty clear indication within the musical text of what the principal source really shows.  The edition uses a complicated series of brackets:  < > angle brackets to indicate material which the editor has filled in following Haydn's shorthand instructions in the autograph score; ( ) rounded brackets to indicate something that is lacking in the principal source but is supplied from a source that is right below it in the chain of textual authority, like performance parts prepared by one of Haydn’s copyists; and [ ] square brackets to indicate something that the editor has added by analogy with some other passage or in order to spell out something musically necessary.  Taking an example almost at random, here is the first system of the musical text of Symphony no. 46 as it appears in JHW, although I have highlighted these distinctions in different colors:

SOURCE:  scan (detail) of the opening of Haydn's Symphony no. 46, as it appears in JHW series I, volume 6 ("Sinfonien 1767-1772"), ed. C-G. Stellan Mörner, p. 104; I have added color highlighting.

The orange passages (indicated in the edition by angle brackets) are realizations of Haydn’s abbreviated instructions for the second violins to double the firsts; the markings highlighted in blue (indicated by the rounded brackets) do not appear in Haydn’s autograph at all but are taken from the most authoritative set of parts.  (Notice that the initial f dynamic is assumed in the autograph, but made explicit in the parts—except for the horns, who maybe never have to be told to play forte.)  The green markings (indicated by the square brackets) are not found in the first or second tier of sources, but were deemed by the editor to be intended or otherwise necessary.  All of this is clearly marked on the published score itself, without even having to turn to the critical report (which gives further details of Haydn’s corrections and second thoughts, as well as other variant readings in the principal sources).

I forget what the particular issue was that afternoon in the Haydn quartet seminar, but when the class was reminded that we needed to know what Haydn wrote (not just what was presented in whatever edition we might have to hand), one of my classmates posited that the ideal music library would comprise high-resolution scans of every source:  then we could all see exactly what was on the page—not just of a composer’s manuscript, but of all the copyists’ scores and parts, and even all the early editions.  Then we would not have to take anyone else’s word for it (as even a critical commentary gives one only the information an editor bothers to relay, and sometimes it may be in error).  

My reaction at the time: Wouldn’t this just compel us all to reinvent the wheel every time?  

A few years after this conversation came sites like Bach Digital:  such portals have the potential of fulfilling my classmate’s wish, with high-resolutions scans not just of autographs, but often a range of derivative sources too—and with no limit to how many sources might be uploaded in the future.  Or take the Online Chopin Variorum Edition—a misnomer, since there is really no editorial authority producing an edited text.  These resources encourage a see-for-yourself approach, even maybe a do-it-yourself approach, and I heartily approve making such resources available beyond the walls of the libraries and other holdings in which they are found.  But do the users of such sites know how to read them?  We are making the materials of editing available without any instruction of what it means.  

In an earlier post, I strongly criticized a particular “urtext” edition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations because of its amateurish assumption that it was presenting the Holy Grail (i.e., Bach’s intended text), while the editor had unknowingly taken a shortcut that undermined his claim.  And the unknowingly is the issue:  when we don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

Take this example, from a scan of Beethoven’s autograph of his Septet, op. 20, very near the end of the first movement.  The top stave is the clarinet, and below that the horn.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20 (held in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow), available on the ISMLP as #774464 and #774465.  This detail  (showing bb. 271–273) comes from the upper right corner of p. 25 (which appears as scan p 15 of $774464).

The last note in the clarinet staff is clearly marked c-natural.  The natural is ostensibly superfluous, as the key signature for a b-flat clarinet in a movement in e-flat major would be just one flat.  Thus it is no surprise that this accidental is eliminated in the new Beethoven Werke edition (ed. Egon Voss, 2008). 

SOURCE: detail of BW IV/I:  Kammermusik mit Blasintrumenten, p. 25.

The critical commentary does not even mention that there was ever a natural sign there—nor does it comment on b. 273 at all.  The commentary does list as a supplemental source Beethoven’s later arrangement of the work as a piano trio, op. 38 (with the option for a clarinet to substitute for the violin), and one would expect that substantial textual differences in otherwise analogous materials would be mentioned.  But when we look up the corresponding moment in op. 38 we may well be surprised:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 95 of Beethoven: Klavier Trios III, ed Friedhelm Klugmann (Henle, 1968), showing bb. 271–273 of the first movement of op. 38.

The top staff here is the violin, which may be replaced by the clarinet on the second staff.  Note that the last note in the clarinet here is c-sharp ( = the b-natural of the violin).  Voss doesn’t mention any of this in his critical commentary to the Septet. 

For the do-it-yourself editor, this discrepancy may seem like an inconsequential difference between the two texts, and that Beethoven clearly must have meant c-natural ( = concert b-flat) in the Septet at this moment, as he actually notated the natural sign.  That is the reading transmitted in virtually every edition.  (I see that someone involved in producing the French edition (Pleyel) in 1828 caught the mistake and emended it, but that emendation didn’t catch on.)  But, looking across a much wider range of manuscripts and with decades of experience, editor Jonathan Del Mar has spotted a pattern of errors which very neatly explains this problem.  This pattern manifests in erroneous accidentals in transposing parts, and indicates that Beethoven used the “clef substitution” method of transposing.  That is, instead of thinking that, for example, each note of a b-flat clarinet part sounds a whole tone lower than notated, he merely thought of this staff as being in the tenor clef, on which he could then note that sounding pitch (albeit sounding an octave higher).  

Beethoven indisputably notated c-natural; Del Mar makes the case that he meant concert b-natural (and thus c-sharp, when transposed up a tone).  He points to exactly the same mistake in a place in the second movement of the Eroica where there really cannot be any doubt of the error.  The autograph is lost, but as the wrong accidental occurs in the closest copyist score, the surviving parts used in the 1804 first performance, and the first edition of 1809 (shown below), the mistake surely descends from Beethoven himself.

SOURCE:  detail of p. 60 of the first edition of Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 (Cianchettini and Sperati, 1809), taken from scan available at https://www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4716012494651392/scan/61; this shows bb. 139-144 of the second movement.

Surely the clarinets and the violas should be in unison; the viola b-natural would need to be transposed as c-sharp for the clarinets, and yet the same natural persists.  Del Mar has observed the same pattern with horns, for example the dubious f-flat that occurs in the fourth movement of the Septet.  Using the clef-substitution method for e-flat horn, Beethoven would have imagined a bass clef on this stave, and the flat is thus coming from the intended sounding a-flat.  Again the argument is that what Beethoven meant is not what he wrote (which should have been f-natural), but we need an experienced editor to recognize that; a facsimile won’t clue us in.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20; This detail  (showing bb. 100–102 of the fourth movement) comes from the upper right corner of p. [52] (which appears as scan p 7 of IMSLP #774465).

But editors should tread lightly on this thin ice, seeking what is meant in preference to what is actually on the page.  (Query:  What did the framers of the Constitution intend?)  A notorious example of this is Jacques-Louis Monod’s recomposed edition of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, in which Monod altered Schoenberg’s score to accord with Schoenberg's theories... or at least with Monod’s analysis.  As James Grier cautions, "Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as the editor" (p. 136).  (I think what my client was meaning to say...)

Many of my posts have dealt with overly intrusive editing—which I think often comes from the temptation to prefer a variant reading just for the sake of an audible difference, maybe in some sense justifying the new edition.  (Here’s a recent post on precisely that topic.)  But I find myself torn between the two quotations with which I started this post.  Silbiger (who himself earned two PhDs) is right to champion the great value of experiencing the sources closest to the original context of the music; and I looooove facsimiles.  I am interested in seeing sources that allow me a glimpse of the composer at work—composing scores, or revisions happening on the page of what otherwise seems to be an attempt at a fair copy.  Here, for example, is Bach revising the text as he transforms the E major violin concerto (BWV 1042) into the D major harpsichord concerto (BWV 1054) in D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 234, a collective score of all seven of the extant concertos for (one) harpsichord, plus a fragment of another.  He had already copied out and transposed the solo line (which at this point features some double stops in the violin version) when he decided to rework the figuration to be more idiomatic on the keyboard.  Having run out of space, he opted for keyboard tablature below the system:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Bach Digital of P 234, p. 48 (detail), showing BWV 1054/iii, bb. 77-87.

There are many examples of similar re-workings throughout these seven concertos—sometimes squeezing in passing tones, at other times inserting much more florid ornamentation.  There is a lot to learn from it. Werner Breig, the editor of the NBA volume of these works carefully documents the corrections and changes to the manuscript in his critical report.  I, for one, am glad to be guided by an editor who has the experience and expertise to discern the patterns behind the markings on the page as it stands; and I would certainly not attempt to perform from a scan of P 234, even the beautifully-produced Bärenreiter facsimile of it.

That is not to say, of course, that Bach intended anyone (other than himself?) to perform directly from this score.  But what of a text from the composer’s hand that is intended to be the performance copy?  This brings up the Facebook group post above:  “Why don’t composers just do their own engraving [recte computer-setting] and page layout?”  Cut out the middleman—like George Crumb, or (for that matter) Wagner.

I have learned a lot from the facebook “Music Engraving Tips” group:  there are all sorts of issues of spacing, orthography, and best-practices in preparing and printing parts, a lot of which had never crossed my mind.  But I’ve also learned that many people who prepare editions of music (whether professional or not) have very little education about music history.  I see the most elementary questions about the meaning of some mark in a manuscript or an old edition; thankfully, these queries are generally answered gracefully and without contempt.  And the group’s members are genuinely concerned with presenting the text in the way that is most immediately accessible to the user—that is, the performer.

Although an individual may interact with a musical text in many different ways, we should conceive of these as distinct roles.  There are surely very few people truly suited to fulfill all of them.  The primary roles might be delineated as: 

1. Composing:  originating and finalizing musical ideas;
2. Notating:  getting those ideas into a graphic form comprehensible by others;
3. Editing:  encompassing a wide variety of activities, but essentially amounting to tweaking the notated text (ideally in dialogue with the composer) to ensure that it presents what is meant; Ralph Vaughan Williams referred to this as “washing its face,” and his sometime assistant Roy Douglas has written an illuminating account of such activity;
4. Setting:  actually getting this text into a form that can be mechanically printed and/or distributed; and
5. Reading/Interpreting/Performing:  the “end user”(?) is presumably a performer, scholar, or listener.

Of course we might interpolate other such functions:  1a might be Orchestrating.  That in itself is a good reminder that an individual may be prodigiously gifted in one of these tasks while having no appreciable ability in another.  Certainly we expect roles 1 and 2 to go together, but we do not necessarily expect a composer to be the best conductor of their own music, though.  (William Walton, a composer I’ve done a lot of work on in my research, is a good example of someone who was generally better off leaving the conducting to the professionals.)  The Facebook post I reproduce above suggests that role 2 is essentially the same as role 4, and that role 3 might be bypassed altogether.

But at what cost?  The value of the middleman editor is to push back:  Is this what you mean?  (Or, for the dead or otherwise unavailable composer, Is this what was meant, given what we know about this composer’s usual practice?)  From my own experience with this blog, I know that I need someone else’s eyes to look over my prose.  I never publish a post without several pairs of eyes reviewing it—and always at least one of the reviewers is neither a musicologist nor a musician.  The comments and suggested revisions I get from that person are particularly helpful because they show where I have made a complete pig’s breakfast of my explanations.  I don’t always adopt the suggestions for revision—as sometimes they have completely misunderstood what I was trying to convey—but I am sure to do something to fix the problems that led them to misread it.  Here I am composing verbal text; musical text it is no different, and it can only be improved by an editorial review of some sort.

And yet, as stated above, I understand why publishers are glad to have camera-ready scores from their composers:  it saves money.  Again:  at what cost?  Here is a bit of the published score to Judith Weir's powerful one-unaccompanied-singer opera King Harald’s Saga.  In this scene, Harald’s two wives bid him farewell as he sets off to conquer England.  Weir wrote the libretto, too, and here it gives each wife the same 12-syllable text.  Weir duly sets this as a 12-tone row; presumably in order to throw the differences in characterization into sharp relief, the second wife presents the row in inversion.

SOURCE: detail of scan of  Judith Weir, King Harald's Saga (Novello, 1982), p. 6.

I have enjoyed teaching this work for many years now, and I’ve used it in classes for music majors as well as for general students who cannot even read music.  It is a fascinating work, particularly in the ways it pushes generic conventions to (maybe past) the breaking point.  And, as a meditation on the senselessness of violence and conquest, it seems always timely.  So I’ve spent a lot of time with this score.  Every time I look at this passage I am irked by the absence of a bar-line near the beginning of the second system:  the second wife should have “take / care,” shouldn’t she?  This is the only place in this section where the bar-line for the second wife is different than the first, and in every other place it seems to indicate which syllable is to be accented—namely, the one right after the bar-line.  I think this is a simple omission in Weir’s fair copy—one that may not matter, as in performance the singer may intuit what Weir was after despite any irregularity of the notation.  Or did Weir mean to break the pattern?  (I haven’t bothered to reach out to her and ask her.  It seems such a petty complaint.)  

Note that here the problem is what isn’t there:  it is not an erroneous marking (as in the Beethoven examples above), but a presumably missing marking.  I do not know in what ways the editorial staff at Novello were involved in the publication of this score, but I think someone should have caught that.  Sure, editors can and do introduce mistakes of their own.  Merely by imposing a house style, an edition can obscure a composer’s musical fingerprint (what in German is usefully called the Partiturbild).  John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven posits that Bach's manuscript notation is expressive of performance gestures:  “There is also the bonus of his graceful and expressive orthography, which reveals the way he experienced his music and expected it to unfold—the shapes and gestures suggestion of his phrasing an motion” (p. 226).  Perhaps. For a much more nuanced argument (relating to Haydn), I recommend James Webster’s “The Triumph of Variability:  Haydn’s Articulation Markings in the Autograph of Sonata No. 49 in E Flat.”  (Webster was the professor directing the seminar discussed above, although I didn’t come across this article until years later.)

Clearly, there is no substitute for getting back into the sources as much as possible; but I don’t regard a musician as negligent if they don’t do that, nor do I regard the performer who plays from a facsimile as on a higher artistic plane than anyone else.  Maybe an analogy would be that a critical edition is like currency or a credit card in place of gold:  the edited text is a convenient substitute for the real thing that will suffice for most musicians in most situations.  But for anyone for whom the text itself is a supreme concern, a good edition is a useful guide and nothing more.

50. That ain’t the way I heer’d it

I grew up listening to the radio a lot.  South Carolina Public Radio in the 1980s played what you would expect from a listener-supported channel:  classical music and jazz; NPR news; and shows like Prairie Home Companion, but also a good bit of programming picked up from the BBC World Service (like the delightful panel games My Word! and My Music!) 

Sometimes American shows from half a century earlier would be re-broadcast.  Of these, I remember particularly Fibber McGee and Molly.  While not exactly a show about nothing, it did manage to succeed without much of a plot.  Instead, it consisted of a continuous series of running gags—most famously the avalanche from a precariously-stacked hall closet, which I'm sure was a perennial challenge for the sound effects team.  Many of the gags involved phone calls or visits with recurring characters.  One of these was known simply as “Mister Old Timer.”  The set-up was the same every time:  Fibber would tell a joke, which Mister Old Timer would then improve, starting off with “That’s pretty good, Sonny; but that ain’t the way I heer’d it.”

Another show I grew up hearing—or really overhearing, since it was usually my dad who tuned in—had the astonishingly pretentious title Adventures in Good Music.  (Of course, “good” meant dead, white, and male.  It was a massive dose of mainly nineteenth-century German repertoire—piano, chamber, and orchestral—the canon of instrumental music.)  It was hosted by the avuncular Karl Haas, who had a spectacular radio voice; more than that, he always had something to say.  (Bootleg recordings of a number of his broadcasts are available on the Internet Archive.)  He opened every episode—and it was broadcast every weekday—by performing anew the opening sixteen bars of the second movement of Beethoven's “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13.  So I heard that opening many, many, many times.  What I heard—what my brain perceived—was this:

But, of course, that is not what Beethoven wrote. I was astonished when I later saw a score and realized I had been mishearing it for many years.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Bärenreiter BA10851, ed. Jonathan Del Mar (2012), p. 11

Well, that ain’t the way I heer’d it.  The b-flat I heard on beat two of the second bar was actually just in the accompaniment.  If had paid more attention—if, that is, my mind had not already decided what I had heard—I would have noticed an oddity when the accompaniment becomes more complicated: the b-flat isn’t there on the beat (in bar 10).  But I didn't.  And even now it is hard for me not to hear it “my” way, unless I’m actually playing it.  My college roommate had an expression for this sort of thing:  it puts a crease on your brain.  No matter how you may unfold it and try to flatten out, that initial impression is indelible, like it or not.

In a graduate school ethnomusicology seminar we were assigned to read Bruno Nettl’s magisterial text The Study of Ethnomusicology, which has appeared in ever-more expanded editions.  The copy I read at the time had the subtitle Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts; the second edition on my desk at the moment says Thirty-one Issues and Concepts; and I see that before his death in 2020 the subtitle of the third edition had become Thirty-Three Discussions.  It is a superb book, welcoming newcomers into a very dynamic and complex field of study.

One of Nettl’s early chapters deals with transcription—writing down music in some sort of notation—and I recognized myself in the title of his chapter:  “I Can’t Say a Thing until I’ve Seen the Score.”  He gives a brief history of transcription as a component of ethnomusicological study—recognized from the start to be problematic, but in some sense unavoidable.  “We have an excessive association of music and notation, equating conventional Western notation with musical sense and musical reality.  We can’t quite remove ourselves from this hallmark of urban Western academic music culture....  To the Western ethnomusicologist, Western notation makes the music seem like ‘real music’.”  [2nd ed. pp. 87f.]  Sure, music exists—thrives even—without notation; but the academic study of it has relied on notation to reify as a visual entity some salient detail of the (sounding) music.  And it doesn't matter what music you’re talking about:  the Beethoven above and my misperception of its performance are both presented to you here as transcriptions.  One is what Beethoven presumably “heard” as he composed (“audiated” is the musical jargon); the other is what I perceived in Karl Haas’s nightly broadcast.  The musical notation isn’t the music, but I use it by default because it helps me to communicate it to you.

I have mentioned in a previous post Malcolm Bilson's engaging video lecture “Knowing the Score,” in which he asks the interesting question “How did he write it down?”  That is, how does a composer (and at the moment Bilson is talking about Prokofiev and Bartók) choose to notate the music?  This is especially fascinating when we can compare the notation with the composer's own recorded performances, but is a worthwhile question of any written compositions.  Notation betrays priorities:  it naturally fails to account for things so obvious as not needing to be made explicit.  A great demonstration of this was performed on Nov. 2, 1963 at the eighth annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology and published nearly a year later in an issue of the journal Ethnomusicology—available via JSTOR, but alas behind a pay-wall.  (There is, however, a 2014 open-access Twentieth Century Music article which opens with a discussion of this famous example.)  This session featured an examination of transcriptions made by four distinguished scholars, each asked to transcribe the same field recording.  It was not a competition in the sense of who had transcribed it best, but rather a consideration of what different transcriptions could reveal about the music and our varying perceptions of it.

  

SOURCE:  reproduced from Jason Stanyek, Forum on Transcription, in Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 11 no. 1 (2014), pp. 101-161; here cropped from p. 102.

What this demonstrated most clearly was that we hear different things.  Each of the four transcriptions emphasized certain nuances of the music while ignoring others.  Hardly a surprise.  Have you ever been at a piano recital when the sustain pedal squeaked?  (I hope not.)  I have, and what I found is that, once I had noticed it, the only thing I could hear was the squeak-squeak-squeak of the pedal.  Or take this moment:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of J. S. Bach, "Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf," BWV 226, bb. 154-161 in the BG edition.

Settling Scores · J. S. Bach: "Der Geist hilft," BWV 226, bb. 154-160

All I can hear in this recording are the almost oppressive S sibilants reverberating around the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.  I can't hear the fugue for all the hissing, and if I was transcribing this without any awareness of the idiom in which it is written, I might think there was an essential percussive element, which is actually incidental and of which Bach was probably utterly unaware.

SOURCE: discogs.com

In that same gradate ethnomusicology seminar, we were assigned to make transcriptions of anything that caught our attention, just for the discipline of transcribing.  I had run across a fascinating disc released by Lyrichord featuring the choral songs of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, an African-American denomination with a distinct oral-tradition repertoire.  So I set about transcribing the very first item on the disc, a piece called “O Lord, How Excellent is Thy Name,” the composition of St. Cuetta Connors of Dayton, Ohio (d. 1970).  The 1990 Lyrichord recording is available on iTunes and Spotify, and is worth a listen.  My transcription (which I post on a separate page) is revealing in its naïveté.  It presents this piece as if Connors had written [sic] a conventional [ = W.A.S.P.] four-part anthem, which the recorded performance was somehow not quite living up to.  I note at the beginning “this transcription assumes a constant tonic of C major,” as the pitch changes (mainly downward) as the piece progresses.  In other words, I made no effort to reflect the changing pitch as sung on the recording, but rather presented some idealized (to me) version.  I see that I identified the purpose of my transcription as “part-writing analysis,” which itself betrays my own predilection to understand this music as some how reflecting a classical (even Handelian) choral tradition rather than accepting it on its own terms.  I assumed that the four parts I heard were S/A/T/B, but as I listen to it now, I think it is a three-way division of the women, with the men all on the lowest part.  But I’m not sure.  Every now and then I mark extra notes with “some voices,” as if suggesting “well, they’re singing those pitches, but they’re not supposed to be.”

Googling now, I find a performance from 2016 of the same choral song.  In some respects, I’m amazed how consistently it preserves what I heard in the 1990 recording, given that it has not been transmitted through notation (that device that supposedly “fixes” music as it should be).  But as I listen, I delight also in “new” notes that have crept in, particularly in the men's part.  (Are they new or just absent in the 1990 rendition that was caught on tape?)  Different as well are the abrupt modulations upward in the extended coda—and very effective they are.  A new performance reveals that there is much more to the piece than I had heard in my attempt to transcribe it 20+ years ago, but similarly my transcription tells me more about myself than it does about the recording I was trying to reify on paper.  That ain’t the way I heer’d it.

 

Other examples that come to mind of my misplaced mental creases are metrical:  mishearing the meter.  An example I have not been able to overcome is the opening of the third movement of Gustav Holst's Second Suite for Military Band.  I first heard these chords as on the beat, and I cannot break free of that until b. 7 (after the melody enters at the end of b. 6).  Maybe Holst was trying to play with the ears of his audience by articulating a sort of “shadow metre.”  Maybe, that is, I am supposed to fall for it.  But even when I know what it is supposed to be, my ears will not cooperate.  (Here’s audio, if you want it.)

SOURCE:  Gustav Holst, Second Suite for Military Band, mvt. 3 bb. 1-12; condensed score (pub. Boosey & Hawkes, 1922); scan available as IMLSO #166850.  (I have added the red arrow added in b. 6 to highlight the entrance of the melody.)

There are lots of examples of such false meters.  Brahms does it all the time.  The finale of the Saint-Saëns Septet is another great example, as is the first movement of his fifth piano concerto.  And sometimes I enjoy knowing that I’m being deceived.  But—and this is the thing—I wouldn't have known I was being tricked if I had not seen the music.  That ain’t the way I heer’d it.  Yet, how much of the music is really intended to be experienced with score in hand?  Am I cheating by looking behind the curtain to see the notation?

Every now and then I see something that ain’t the way I heer’d itt, but the problem is not my perception but the notation.  Here (on the middle staff) is an example of a triple meter tune—3/2 with an upbeat—shoe-horned into common time (and with the whole-notes in bb. 4 and 11 representing a lingering on the last note of a phrase).  

SOURCE:  cropped scan from The Southern Harmony (1854 edition), from Hymnary.org

You see that sort of thing every now and then in the shaped-note tradition, and occasionally the error has lingered on into modern hymnbooks.  In this instance, many other books of its time got it “right.”  Then again, such an assessment assumes that the composer and I share a like musical understanding, but that the music is just notated wrongly.  But what if it’s not?  How can I know?  I came across a passage in the autobiography of Broadway arranger Robert Russell Bennett (1894–1981) where he notates a bugle call he heard regularly in France during World War I:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of George J. Ferencz, ed, "The Broadway Sound":  The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett (Univ. of Rochester Press, 1999), p. 89

What puzzles me is Bennett’s metrical notation.  What was he hearing?  Was the player thinking in terms of these uneven bars, or was it something more like this?

SOURCE:  my own hypothetical re-barring of Bennett's example

Of course I could not hear the source performance, but it seems to me that Bennett’s transcription is needlessly complicated.  And yet I don’t doubt that he wrote what he heard.  But would I have heard the same thing?  And are we just back to Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

My concern in this blog—and my professional preoccupation—has been the written music, the notated text.  Now I am confronted by that humbling truism.  Just as we will never be nourished by the delicious odors in the kitchen, still less perusing a cookbook, but only in the eating of meal, the only music that truly matters is not what is written down nor what is realized in performance but rather what is heard.  Of course, it may be heard and appreciated differently by each listener in turn (and it may be heard aright or misheard in various ways).   Neither the composer nor performer(s) may have much power to rectify what any individual listener perceives.  Yet I am inclined to think of that space between the sounding of the notes and the interpretation by the listener as holy ground.